


i'm waiting for something, always waiting

by endofadream



Category: Glee
Genre: Angst, Fluff, M/M, Pushing Daisies AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-21
Updated: 2014-08-21
Packaged: 2018-02-14 04:47:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2178474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endofadream/pseuds/endofadream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kurt Hummel, a humble piemaker with a not-so humble ability, brings his childhood crush, Blaine Anderson, back to life to solve his murder. However, Kurt must also keep his distance from Blaine, because if they touch again Blaine will be dead forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'm waiting for something, always waiting

When Kurt Hummel is twenty-six years, fifty-nine days, twelve hours, and twenty minutes old, he finds himself staring down at the face of his childhood crush, Blaine Anderson.  
  
As Kurt is wondering how all of this could have happened, and how the last time he had seen Blaine had been seventeen years ago when Blaine had kissed him, a tap on the shoulder jolts him forcibly out of his thoughts. He jumps, whirling around, and comes face-to-face with his less-than-patient partner.  
  
Santana Lopez, private investigator extraordinaire, crosses her arms over her low-cut blouse, scowling as she looks to the coffin and back up to Kurt's apologetic face. A well-plucked eyebrow arches gracefully towards the ceiling. "We haven't got all day, doe eyes. You gonna tap him or not?"  
  
The facts were these: at nine years, ten months, eleven days, and twenty-three hours old Kurt Hummel had discovered that he possessed a power—a power to raise the dead. Looking down at the sprawled body of his golden retriever, Thatcher, all it had taken was one curious touch, one curious finger, to the faintly-ruffled coat of his beloved dog and suddenly the once-dead was dead no more: Thatcher had sprung up, sprightly like the day Kurt's father had brought her home from the shelter and looking not at all like a semi had just taken her down.  
  
Since then Kurt has learned the basic principles: one touch and the dead rises. Longer than a minute and something else must take their place. Another touch and dead again, this time for good. It’s how he and Santana Lopez, with her razor-sharp tongue and just-as-sharp heels, had gotten to know each other. After all, it's a lot easier to solve crimes when the dead can talk.  
  
Taking a deep breath Kurt peers into the coffin again, letting his gulp echo in the room. There’s just something unsettling about staring down at the dead, a little wormlike niggling that has permanently seated itself low in Kurt’s belly. "It’s not their fault," Kurt catches himself saying. "They don't know they're being looked at or why; they probably feel like creatures on display at the zoo."  
  
Across the room Santana groans. " _Hummel_ ," she stresses.  
  
Kurt shakes his head, his shoulders, loosens his body and puffs out shallow breaths like he’s jogging. "Right, right." He hesitates when he reaches out again, his fingers hovering centimeters above Blaine's cheek. Santana doesn't know about their connection, how this body is just a little more than their usual ones, and he honestly doesn't think that he can do it while she's here. It feels off, odd, like he’s become the spectacle and she the spectator. Selfishly, Kurt wants to be the first—and only—person Blaine sees when he wakes.  
  
Turning around, Kurt bites his lip. "Do you think you could...leave?"  
  
The look he receives is far beyond annoyed. "Why?"  
  
"Just...personal reasons? Go find Jacob or something and ask him about the other priceless antiques he's stolen from other dead bodies."

It isn’t easy but it isn’t difficult either; with one last sharp, withering glare, a crisp reminder that they don’t have all day, and a firm “ _One_ minute, Hummel. Just because helmet-hair here is cute doesn’t mean you get to break the rules,” Santana is turning on her fashionable heels with a flip of her dark hair.  
  
Once the door shuts behind her Kurt turns back, takes a deep breath, and stares down the lonely tourist who used to know all of his secrets except one.

The boy surrounded by satin and oak before Kurt doesn't deserve this, hadn't deserved to get mercilessly strangled on a cruise and crudely dumped overboard. He’d deserved an explanation for Kurt abruptly moving away those seventeen years ago and the static silence that had followed.

Sometimes Kurt can still feel the faint press of Blaine's lips on his if he allows himself a moment to drift back to a painful past, but it isn’t often; Kurt prefers to focus on the now, on his shop and the cases and the rewarding-but-not-quite-filling sense of having solved a murder. The feeling is a lot like stopping yourself from finishing a dessert before you’re full because you know that you’ll regret it if you don’t.  
  
With a deep breath and only a faint scrunching of his face, Kurt gently touches the tip of his finger to Blaine's cheek.  
  
Immediately Blaine sits up with a gasp, eyes opening and going wide. At first they're clouded with confusion, dull and dark and lifeless; as he twists, takes in his surroundings and looks up, they land on Kurt and like his body they seem to light up again, glow with life. When it sinks in—and it does, slowly, the way one might fall asleep—recognition is a quick spark, and Blaine's voice is confused and incredulous as he says, in disbelief, "Kurt?"  
  
All Kurt can do is awkwardly wave and offer a small smile.  
  
\----  
  
At age eight, a year before Kurt had discovered his ability, he’d lost his mother. Adjusting to life without her had been hard, and though his dad had tried there had just been no filling the Elizabeth-shaped hole left in their lives, gaping and raw like a wound. The one solace that Kurt had had were his mother’s old cookbooks, the ones passed down from her mother and filled, page after page, with fantastical recipes.

Elizabeth’s favorite thing to bake had been pie, and some of Kurt’s earliest memories are of him in the kitchen helping her, kneading the dough carefully under his hands, the way he’s learned to handle everything in his life, as she’d made the filling from scratch.

It makes sense that, years later, Kurt would wind back up full-circle to pie; “It’s home, after all,” he has a habit of saying, “and people always come home.”

And it isn’t to say that his ability doesn’t come in handy, either: pie-making is a much more lucrative business if he can buy spoiled fruit—as long as he touches it only once. And Rachel Berry, the petite, upbeat, loud-voiced NYADA student and Kurt’s most devoted (and only) waitress certainly helps draw in the customers as well.

Which now brings us to the present day exactly one week, seven hours, and forty-nine minutes after Kurt had traded Blaine’s life for the one of the shifty funeral director’s, to the Pie Hole, Kurt’s quaint little eatery on the corner of a busy New York street, on a busy, blustery Tuesday afternoon in February.

With Rachel tending to the front room, and with Blaine helping her, it gives Kurt more time baking in the kitchen with Thatcher happily thumping her tail at his feet. This is Kurt’s happy place, where he goes to forget the cases he’s been on with Santana, his own crippling loneliness, and the frustratingly rewarding fact that, bereft of a family to return to lest he be accused of faking his own death, Blaine now lives with Kurt in Kurt’s modest apartment above the Pie Hole.

Kurt looks up from carefully placing the lattice crust on today’s still-unbaked special—cranberry, the one his mother would make for Thanksgiving and cold fall days that were better spent curled under a comforter next to a fire with a glass of warm milk—and stares out into the restaurant with a proud half-smile on his face. It is, by all means, a perfect arrangement, and it isn’t difficult for Kurt to feel proud of how far he’s come.

However, when he catches sight of Blaine flitting about from table to table, face lit up with a wide smile, something longing opens its expansive maw in Kurt’s belly with a yawn, shaking loose a horribly empty, hollow feeling. What should have been just a simple instance of giving someone back the life they had never gotten to live had managed to shake out of hibernation feelings Kurt had believed to be long gone by now. And it’s _frustrating_.

Rachel’s head appears in the window. “Table seven wants a slice of key lime.”

Kurt, startled out of his thoughts of absolutely _not_ longing, dusts the flour off his hands and steps carefully around Thatcher to cut off a slice of the appropriate pie. He carefully plates it and hands it to Rachel, wiping his hands off on his apron again as she stares him down in that critical, soul-searching way that she has that always, without fail, leaves Kurt feeling like a guilty child caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

He smiles, bright and close-lipped. Rachel still looks unconvinced as she looks off to the side and sees Blaine chatting to an elderly couple.

After Rachel finally disappears to deliver the pie to its happy customer Kurt allows himself a moment to stare out at the diners, something like wistful longing on his face as he unconsciously seeks out that familiar dark head of hair. The restaurant, though already bright and gaudy with warm, candy-inspired colors, seems especially shinier with its new addition.

Just as Kurt’s heading back towards the counter Blaine’s voice sounds from around the corner of the doorway: “Walking!”

Kurt stops. “Waiting!” he calls back.

It’s a system they’ve devised to keep nasty accidents from happening—namely, the dreaded second touch. Rachel, who has no idea of what Kurt can do, or of what Blaine is, always looks at them like they’ve grown a new head each every time. Kurt would rather have that than her know the truth.

The moment their eyes meet Kurt feels the racing heat of a blush, feels like he’s nine years old again and Blaine’s lips are touching his for the first—and last—time. To give himself something to do he hunches his shoulders, tries to make himself appear smaller as he shoves his hand in the pocket of his apron to give the appearance of something to do with his hands. Kurt, for his tall stature and gravitating persona, truly does like to blend in to the background. Having a special ability is enough of a standout, thank you very much.

Blaine smiles brightly before dropping into a crouch and reaching out a hand towards Thatcher. Kurt stares with a different kind of longing as Blaine runs his hand over Thatcher’s red fur, scratches behind her velvety ear and rubs over her sloping muzzle. Kurt hasn’t been able to touch his dog since reviving her, and while he’s created contraptions to giver her the love and attention she deserves, as well as regularly employing Rachel as her caretaker, there’s just something wholly unsatisfying about watching someone else pet your animal when you know that you can’t.

Giving Thatcher one last scratch under her chin, Blaine straightens up and adjusts the collar of his dress shirt.

Life suits Blaine, Kurt’s decided. It suits him like spring does the trees, and a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream does their best-selling apple pie. Blaine possesses that kind of zest that Kurt, who makes pies and revives people for a living, can only dream about.

“Busier than usual today,” Blaine comments, his lower lip between his teeth.

Kurt watches the way that Blaine chews on it. “Cold days bring a lot of sit-down business. And on cold days like these people yearn for the coziness of home and warmth and where better to get that than a warm slice of pie?”

“And a warm glass of milk,” Blaine adds, drawing his lips into his mouth before smiling.

Kurt’s heart does a little flip, not unlike the little flip a beginning diver might execute from the smallest diving board. “You remember,” he says. It’s not a question.

Blaine laughs softly and shuffles closer. There’s still a good three feet of space between them, but if Kurt closes his eyes he can pretend that there is none, that Blaine is in his arms already, smelling of hair gel and cologne and flour and sweet pie filling.

“The special today is cranberry pie,” Blaine says. He looks suddenly shy, uncharacteristic of his bubbly, vivacious personality. “Of course I remember.”

In any other scenario this would be where the two would lean in and seal the deal despite the hungry people and the pies waiting to be baked. Rachel would have to scold them and remind them that they’re running a business, not a peep show, and they’d break apart, blushing and laughing and would spend the rest of the day shooting each other longing, furtive glances in between crusts and customers.

But this is their reality, and when they lean in they abruptly pull away. Kurt’s heart pounds, fast and incessant, and he feels jittery, filled with nervous energy like he’s drank three cups of espresso from the new machine that Rachel had had installed last week.

Prior to giving Blaine his second chance Kurt hadn’t known how hard it would be to do this, to have this _opportunity_ to fix all the loose ends, sewing them up like a stitch on an old sweater, but not being able to actually _touch_ it. Blaine is that object in a dream, unattainable no matter how quickly you rush towards it.

Kurt tries his best to shake off his sadness that clings to him like the sticky strands of a spider web. Rolling his shoulders, he turns towards the table, then back, starting to say, “I—I like—” before something smooth and cool and taut is being pressed against his face.

And then lips are against his.

Without thinking, without opening his eyes, Kurt knows who it is, and he allows himself this. He allows himself to sag forward slightly, to press his lips a little harder to Blaine’s and to think that, despite the thin cover of plastic wrap stretching tightly across his face and smushing his nose, they still feel the same as he remembers.

They stay until they both run out of air, Kurt’s heart pounding so loud that he’s sure Blaine can hear it. When he pulls back Kurt’s voice is breathy as he says, “You really shouldn’t do that.”

What he means, however, is quite the opposite: _do it again. And again. And again_.

He finally opens his eyes, sees Blaine stretching a wide, jagged piece of plastic wrap between them. Through it his smile is distorted but still the same, and his hazel eyes are bright, mischievous. “Are you telling me that you don’t like it?” he teases, taking another step back and lowering the plastic wrap. Despite his bravado he looks a little hesitant, like he’s waiting to be judged. His cheeks are tinged, faintly, with pink, and he bites his lip, gives Kurt a smile and dips his head briefly to scuff the toe of his shoe against the floor. Kurt has never seen anything more adorable.

Kurt laughs, rolls his eyes. He tries to compose himself, picking up his abandoned pie to place it in the oven. He leans against the door when he shuts it, lets his eyes rove over Blaine’s simple white dress shirt, his tight, dark-wash jeans, the plastic wrap still clutched in one hand. His brows rise when Kurt’s eyes finally trail back up to his face, and when they meet Kurt smiles, crooked and goofy and fond. “I liked it.”


End file.
